Egypt

In my mind’s eye, Cairo is one of those legendary cities -ancient, exotic, intriguing, romantic, glamorous and squalid. Like, say, Istanbul, it occupies a significant position between East and West and, indeed, North and South. A colossus of a city, spawned by the waters of the River Nile and honed and shaped by 7,000 years of civilization. I picture grand boulevards and fine colonial buildings, legacies of the French and British. There will be grand but faded hotels, originally built for the Grand Tour and the dilettante aristocratic Egyptologists (and Americans too, of course, who plundered the country in the name of art). There will be mysterious souks and markets redolent of cinnamon, cumin, coriander, saffron, pepper and all manner of spices. There will be stalls of exotic fruit and vegetables, there will be mountains of dates and pomegranates, there will be dark cafés, with Art Deco metal tables and chairs glinting beneath a slowly rotating ceiling fan, where you sip sweet, strong Turkish coffee, maybe smoke a water pipe or nibble on an exotic, honey-sweet pastry of cashew nuts and dried fruit. And, of course, there will be fine, faded and probably shambolic old restaurants, where colonial France melts, gastronomically speaking, into the Orient.